


Penance

by thesignsofserbia



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt, Episode: s02e03 The Reichenbach Fall, Gen, Grieving John, Guilt, M/M, Making Up, Not Season/Series 03 Compliant, POV Sherlock Holmes, Penance - Freeform, Poor John, Post-Reichenbach, Scars, Self-Hatred, Sherlock Holmes Returns after Reichenbach, Sherlock Holmes and Feelings, Sherlock Loves John, Sherlock is hurting, Sherlock-centric, Sherlocks thoughts during the rooftop scene, The Fall - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-04
Updated: 2015-08-04
Packaged: 2018-04-12 22:50:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4497729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesignsofserbia/pseuds/thesignsofserbia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Frequently he feels the urge to scream at John, to return the verbal blows as good as he is given. He wants to get right in John’s face and shout that it has been hard on him too damn it.</p><p>But It wasn’t about him right now, what was important was what John was feeling, and atoning for the hurt he had caused.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Penance

 

 

Frequently he feels the urge to scream at John, to return the verbal blows as good as he is given. He wants to get right in John’s face and shout that it has been hard on him too damn it.

  
Every day he had missed him.

  
He’d almost given everything away on that rooftop where he had been crushed by a moment of doubt. Hearing John utter the words; ‘ _You Could_ ,’ the force of John’s belief in him had made him doubt what he was doing, _what the hell was he doing?!_

  
And that doubt had almost been strong enough to undermine everything, all their careful planning, by distracting him from the objective. Sherlock had almost confessed everything right there and then, killing the entire scheme before it had even come to fruition, and probably John along with it.

  
Deceiving John in that way had almost torn him apart, he hadn’t anticipated how hard it would actually be in practice, and there had been a moment when he honestly hadn’t thought he could do it.

  
But he would never gamble John’s life that way, and so he’d clamped down on his conscience, discarded the phone, spread his arms and taken the plunge. Literally.

  
The drop had been awful, even though he’d known he would survive it, his brain had screamed at him every second of the way to stop. Every second of it shredded raw the nerves of his innate sense of self preservation.

  
He looked down and he needed to jump, but he didn’t want to do it, not to John or to himself. It was not true that he didn’t know the meaning of fear, and those who claimed so should have their fingers and toes broken.

  
The dread in his stomach when he was in freefall, the bite of the wind, the way the world rushed up to greet him with alarming speed. He was very nearly sick.

 

Then he hit the mat and it was a shock to the system, he felt exhilarated, dreadful, shell-shocked, shaky, and absolutely on _fire_ with adrenaline, but there was no time to waste so the show went on. The terrible, cruel theatrics.

 

Not reacting to John’s devastation afterwards on the pavement, as he saw what he thought was his best friend’s broken corpse, had been harder still.

 

_Jesus no. God no._

 

That phone call to John would weigh on him for the rest of his life, the sound of John’s voice breaking at his grave was imprinted on his mind forever.

 

_Just stop it. Stop this._

 

Oh how he’d wanted nothing more.

 

Sherlock was not a modest man, and he knew exactly how important he was to John Watson, he’d known that before he jumped. John had been a broken man when they met, and Sherlock had fixed him. He’d built him up only to tear him down again.

 

Now Sherlock had to live with what he had done.

 

There are some things that, according to society, you just don’t do. Things that qualify as an unforgivable breach of trust, and faking one’s death in front of a loved one will certainly be pretty high up that list.

  
John’s life disintegrated after the _incident_ at Saint Bartholomew’s; Sherlock’s literal and figurative fall from grace. He had been the singular catalyst for John’s entire world falling apart. He’d been inconsolable; he’d lost his job, sunk into a severe depression, nearly drinking himself to death, resulting in severe financial difficulty. It had taken him 18 months just to get back on his feet.

  
Sherlock was aware of this.

  
Sherlock had insisted that on his return, Mycroft fill him in, in minute detail, about the aftershocks of the impact, no matter how hard it was to hear.

  
He repeated it to himself, the story of John’s pain, over and over.

  
He looked at all the surveillance footage stills of a stooped, miserable man with nothing to live for a million times, burning them onto his retinas.

  
And he reads the transcripts from John’s sporadic therapy appointments, ones that Mycroft should _not_ have (and he’d been angry at his brother for it, but read them anyway; poured over every detail with a clenched fist to his mouth) and repeated the words out aloud to himself to make them real, because they were. He reads them until he can quote each one verbatim; he will not delete any of this.

  
He makes himself understand John’s pain and feel it.

  
But sometimes when John is angry, even though he knew he deserves John’s anger, Sherlock feels like he’s had enough, he’s reaching breaking point emotionally.

  
Very occasionally, he feels compelled to just show John the dozens of angry scars on his back, to tell him about living with the guilt, to scream that he’d saved their lives, that it _wasn’t fair_ , that he’d already paid his dues.

  
But he won’t say this to John, perhaps he never would.

  
Because it _is_ fair.

  
It wasn’t about him right now, what was important was what John was feeling, and atoning for the hurt he had caused.

  
Sherlock would keep his silence.

  
This would be his penance.


End file.
